Just a closer walk

Ten or twelve white-haired ladies and a few bald gents in wheelchairs sing "Just a closer walk with thee," their wrinkled faces beaming with joy even though it's been a while since most of them have walked at all. They gather in a meeting room at their nursing home to sing and pray and hear a little preaching, sometimes interrupted by a congregant's urgent need to ask a question or use the rest room. One woman falls asleep in the middle of the service, her head slumped over so far that from the back she looks like a propped-up torso, but as soon as the first notes of some old hymn start up, the sleepy head pops up and lends a whispery voice to the singing.

This is my father's world now, and my brother's too. My brother preaches every Sunday at a nursing home near where my father is now in assisted living, so over the long weekend I helped out by picking up Dad and taking him to hear his youngest son preach.

Dad doesn't like to miss church these days, which is kind of interesting given the hundreds of times in my youth when he dropped me off at church and then drove home to read the paper or watch Sunday-morning television. Today the church that nurtured me through my difficult adolescence is being torn down to make room for a senior living community; meanwhile, Dad lives in assisted living and delights to go to church at a nursing home.

He misses his church back in Florida, of course--the Sunday School class he adopted as family, all the hands he shook as a greeter every Sunday morning, his men's prayer group and the waitress who knew his regular order when they all went out to breakfast afterward. But he introduced me to the new friends he's making in North Carolina, including a man more than 100 years old and another whom he's invited to join him for church.

The old folks fall silent when the guitar-strumming worship leader switches to a more recent praise chorus, but they join in with gusto on their old favorites. They sing "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home" as if they can hear the chariot wheels rumbling right up the road, and they sing about a closer walk with God as if He's waiting just outside the door. 

I want to be like that when I get old, I think, but then why not now? Why not live every day as if the chariot wheels are rumbling my way and the final door could open at any moment?

The previous evening I'd had dinner with an old friend--one of my oldest friends, in fact; a woman I've known since sixth grade--who told me about the massive heart attack that had almost killed her last spring. If she'd been alone at home she'd be a goner, but fortunately she was at her gym just finishing a CrossFit class when she collapsed and got immediate help. Now if you had looked at the two of us and tried to guess which one was more likely to have a heart attack in her 50s, you would not pick my friend. But there it is: given the right conditions, a heart attack can fell the fittest person while the fatter one stays safe. (For now.) 


But all this morbid musing could only last so long before I had to head back to Ohio to resume my place in the land of the young and the giddy and the temporarily able-bodied. I commended my brother for doing God's work and hugged Dad goodbye and headed up the road with Just a closer walk with thee ringing in my ears. Sometimes I droop and forget what real faith looks like, but those wrinkly old faces singing with joy filled my heart with a little bit of heaven.